Chicago was host to the Fall PC Expo held on October 19-21, 1993.

There were over 40,000 visitors to this show which had over 40 seminars and over 230 vendors. Philippe Kahn, Chairman and founder of Borland International, Inc., gave the keynote address and discussed office automation, client/server computing and demonstrated the use of "publish and subscribe" work group computing.

Assisting users
Two solutions to the "lack of consistency between programs" problem that I discussed in this column, last month, were announced at PC Expo from two very dissimilar software companies.

Bill Gates, President of Microsoft, announced a new version of Microsoft Office which has the useful features of a common user interface between programs and "tip wizards".

Newlab, a small software company from Florissant, Missouri, announced the Elli product line, which when it released will interface with the user in a natural language context. This means that you can type questions to the computer, in English, about your data and it will then give you the answer.

It will be interesting to see what happens with these two products.

New products
Shapeware's Visio 2.0 was shown which was one of the first non-Microsoft programs to support the OLE 2.0 portion of Windows.

WordPerfect showed off their new WordPerfect 6.0a (a DOS program), which has both the usual DOS text interface, along with a graphical user interface that you can switch between. The text interface user had access to pull-down menus and button bars.

IBM Corporation is busy assisting vendors develop new drivers for their OS/2 2.1 product. Saw OS/2 playing back 2 video clips simultaneously while the solitaire game was automatically playing. Interesting.

Copyright © 1993 Rick Smith All rights reserved.